Human Touch is not a bad album. It contains too many great moment to be that. Thus, the title track is a great piece of music offering an insightful account of love and eroticism between mature people. Real World is a typical Springsteen anthem, which leaves the impression that the author of Born to Run and Badlands may have grown older but hasn't lost his edge. Roll of the dice is a powerful rocker featuring first and foremost the thunder of Roy Bittan's piano playing. And Gloria's Eyes is a most scary song about loosing the love of a beautiful woman - gradually, self-inflictedly and haunted by spooky questions such as: "tell me, is that a smile? Or is it something else?".
But in spite of these and other highlights, Human Touch is not a great album either. Songs like All or Nothin' At All and I Wish I Were blind express a kind of jalousie that has been expressed a million times before. And nothing is really added by the peculiar history and attitude to life of Bruce Springsteen. 57 Channels is quite funny but lacks the constructive aspect, the effort to make something out of a difficult situation, that has always been the essential characteristic of a Springsteen song. It is the kind of song Lou Reed would write! Real Man and Man's Job are seriously bordering on the tasteless with their self-righteous use of the concept of manliness. And to round off the album with a lullaby (Pony Boy which has presumably been used by Springsteen in his family life) may be quite funny but nothing more.
All in all, Human Touch may work tolerably as a collection of songs but lacks the coherence and determination of a great Springsteen album. In all probability, this has to do with Springsteen’s personal situation at the time he made Human Touch and with his problems in mastering it artistically. He had just turned forty and married and had a family. Furthermore, he seemed to have developed a new sense of consciousness of guilt, deriving from the failure of his first marriage and maybe even from the very fact of his stardom and wealth. Whatever the reason, Human Touch wasn’t the kind of unified statement about an existential situation that Springsteen’s great albums had been. He didn’t reach his one true voice of the moment but ended up with a hotchpotch of voices, some more reliable than others. In a way, this makes Human Touch his most naked album. But it is probably also his worst and it seems to hold the answer to why he eventually became a storyteller – i. e. stopped singing about himself.